This week Chris Kemp, who was CTO of NASA by the time he was 12 (kidding, but that’s not too far off), talks about how he got into the space program and the odd aspects of working in an organization that, on the one hand required U.S. scientists to collaborate openly with colleagues worldwide but also had a top-secret U.S. military-only aspect.

Chris Kemp

At NASA Kemp started to build what has become OpenStack, open-source cloud infrastructure. That technology is now the foundation of public and private cloud offerings from a dozen or more companies, a multiplicity which will lead to consolidation — which is a good thing, he says. Another topic: How he paid 5 grand to experience weightlessness in a gut-wrenching flight aboard a modified 727.